Poker Strategy

Atomic Habits for Poker Players: Small Changes, Big Results

If you’re looking to build better poker habits, the best-selling book Atomic Habits is a revelation. The book breaks down the process of habit building into four key steps (or rules) that anyone can take to greatly increase the likelihood of accomplishing their goals.

Here they are along with some ways to use them to improve our bottom line at the poker table.

Rule 1: Make It Easy

The first rule of successful habit-building is to create steps toward it that are as straight-forward and easy to accomplish as humanly possible.

If your goal was to play the highest stakes online, for example, you wouldn’t start by sitting across the table from Tom Dwan. Instead, applying the philosophy of make it easy, you might start by playing your normal limits and making it a goal to mark off just one single hand where you were unsure of the right play. That’s it. That’s step one. Easy peezy.

According to the teachings of the book, once you’ve accomplished that goal a few times over, you would then move on to another easy goal. For example, now I want to study just one hand for no more than 10 minutes. Of course, you can always choose to study for half an hour if you’d like, or review 5 hands. The point is to keep the initial and each subsequent goal so easy, that we face no internal resistance to it whatsoever.

Whatever your ultimate goal is, break it down to its most fundamental, doable parts, and then progress through them one at a time, spending a few days or even weeks on each individual step until it becomes an automatic part of your life. Imagine what you could accomplish over the course of a decade or two with that type of consistent and systematic growth.

Rule 2: Make It Obvious

The second step of successful habit-building is to make whatever you’re trying to accomplish stupidly obvious by seeking out ways to constantly keep it front of mind. Say, for example, you wanted to work out more but had huge internal resistance to it. Using the make it obvious rule, you could move your dumbbells out from the garage and place them where you watch Netflix, so that at least some of the time, you’ll undoubtedly get inspired to do a few reps. When the starting point is zero, just getting to one is a great improvement.

One way you could use this at the poker table is to post sticky notes on your monitor with whatever it is that you’re trying to work on during that session. As silly as it might sound, taking a bad beat and looking up to see a note reminding you to take a deep breath can have a massive impact on your psyche.

Similarly, if you were trying to learn a new set of preflop hand ranges, you could post a chart of it on your fridge, or the bathroom mirror, so that you are constantly reminded of your goal, and can move it forward, even just slightly, with pretty much no added effort at all. Make it obvious, make it easy.

Rules 3 & 4: Make It Attractive & Satisfying

If I told you that you had to spend the next eight hours doing very tedious poker hand-range analysis, entering dozens upon dozens of simulation results into a spreadsheet, you probably wouldn’t be very excited about the prospect (unless you’re a complete sicko). But if I then told you that sitting next to you while you did that was your favorite poker pro of all time, your excitement level would probably go through the roof.

And if I told you that every time you ran a mile, I would give you $1 million, how far do you think you’d run this year? Probably pretty far, right?

It’s true that our day-to-day options will be far less attractive or satisfying than either of those scenarios, but the point remains. Whether it’s rewarding yourself with a sour key every time you take a bad beat and are able to successfully move your focus to the next hand, or allowing yourself to play half an hour of video games for every hour of study you do, the important thing is to find the things that make the hard things more enticing until they no longer seem so hard.

And so, regardless if you’re trying to become a better poker player, get healthier, or tackle that creative project you’re forever saying you’re going to start, by following the 4 rules of Atomic Habits: make it easier, more obvious, more attractive and more satisfying, you’ll have removed the biggest blocks to successful habit-building and likely set yourself up for some great compounding successes.

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